


prompt: secret admirers

by alestar



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-06-30
Updated: 2009-06-30
Packaged: 2017-10-06 06:49:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/50862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alestar/pseuds/alestar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Short.  After five years, I re-classified this as Kirk/McCoy rather than gen because, let's face it.  </p>
<p>
  <i>Jim was pulled with obsessive frequency to those variables.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	prompt: secret admirers

Jim sipped innocuously at a glass of syntheholic whiskey. He didn't feel right drinking something stronger when anything could happen at any moment on his ship-- but he comforted himself with the thought of shore leave: incapacitatingly drunk, half-dressed, mute, slumped somewhere amid the faint smell of garbage.

"Bones," he said.

McCoy didn't look up from his datapad, but he did rub at his eyebrow in acknowledgment. "Yeah?"

"In that other reality, where the _Kelvin_ wasn't destroyed..."

McCoy shook his head. He scrolled through some pages with a fingertip, then tossed the datapad to the side. "It's too early for this, Jim."

"Yeah, but listen." McCoy sighed.

He could always gauge Jim's mood based on his _In that other reality question_.

Sometimes it was stupid-- _In that other reality, do you think they had 683 Class-N Wild hovercycles?_ Sometimes it was a little heavier, like, _Do you think my mom was happy?_ Sometimes their conversations transitioned directly from _Tell me about the most beautiful woman you ever met besides your ex-wife_ (one of Jim's favorite lines of conversation) to _Who do you think was the most beautiful woman you ever met in that other reality?_ Jim was pulled with obsessive frequency to those variables.

"What," said McCoy.

"Do you think we knew each other?"

McCoy leaned back in his chair and let his gaze slide up the wall of his office, from one pearly luminescent shelf to another. "Doesn't seem likely. If you hadn't been such a complete fuck-up in your younger years, you would've graduated long before I did. We woulda never met going in."

"What makes you think that other me wasn't a fuck-up? Some things aren't circumstantial." Jim tapped the lip of his glass meditatively. "Some things are foundational to the universe."

"Tell me about it." His gaze settled on the chronometer. Jim had been off-duty for 45 minutes. McCoy, however, unlike the ship's _captain_, had 20 minutes left. "But isn't your problem that your father died, and then your mother and brother abandoned you because of that?"

Jim blinked. "Jesus, Bones," he said. McCoy shook his head. Apparently they weren't having that conversation tonight.

"Anyway," McCoy said, "You were best friends with that pointy-eared goblin on the bridge. That means you were reputable and law-abiding."

Jim wrinkled his nose in childish disgust, but he said, "Whatever, I'm law-abiding."

"Angsting before you break a rule is not the same as abiding."

"What about you, then?" McCoy lifted his eyebrows; he was totally law-abiding. "If I'm dignified and well-behaved and best buddies with Commander Spock in that other reality, what do you do with all of your time?"

McCoy finally picked up the glass of abrasive nothingness called synthehol that Jim had set before him. He took a sip and wrinkled his nose.

He didn't like to think about variations of his life.

In Jim's case, the obsession made sense-- the bits and pieces of that other world were relics, solid objects of regret-- not the ephemeral regret that most people were haunted with, but a place with figures and boundaries. In McCoy's case, there was no data-- and to him it just seemed bleak. It was part of his paranoiac nature; disaster loomed in the inky void.

As things were, McCoy was chief physician of the finest ship in Star Fleet, and he was a good doctor, and he and Chapel and Sulu played terrace in Sulu's quarters every Thursday. Jim was his best friend. This was his life.

"Yeah, I imagine life is pretty boring," said McCoy, "what with getting my reports done on time so I can go home."

Jim drained the last of his drink and smirked. "So fucking depressing. Leave work on time, nobody in the sickbay with Thymerian malaria from some weird planet--" _Thymerian_ was not a real word. --"go back to your quarters with your ugly girlfriend--" Jim always claimed to protect McCoy from ugly girlfriends, though there had never been any active example of that. "--and dream in vain of glory and heroic space adventures."

McCoy laughed and pushed his still-full glass of synthehol whiskey across the desk to Jim.

Jim was honestly one of the most intelligent men McCoy had ever met, with a genius knack for piecing together data, for interlocking actions and consequences to create sound strategy and accurate conclusions, like it was nothing-- and he was a good guy-- but he was so weird.

Jim took the glass.

"I doubt I'd be in Star Fleet," said McCoy, after a moment. "And definitely not on a starship."

"Not in Star Fleet," said Jim incredulously, as though it had ever occurred to either of them to enlist more than four years ago. "Why?"

McCoy shrugged. "I signed up with Star Fleet because I was _leaving_." It was true; he had driven from his wife's apartment to a park, then, with nowhere else to go, to a recruitment office. Nowhere was away enough. "Not because I was staying."

Jim had lingered over the first glass of synthehol, but this one-- he turned it on the desktop for a moment, looking at Bones-- then he drained it in two long swallows, like it was real whiskey. He set the glass down with a clink.

"Why did you stay, then?" he asked.

McCoy's mouth twisted wryly.

There were a number of things he could say, the best and most accurate being _Someone has to keep you out of trouble._  Instead, he said, "You're getting sentimental, and you're not even drunk." He jutted his thumb at the chronometer on the wall and added, "Get out of my office."


End file.
